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Part I: The Future of Road Tripping
“I’m doing great; how are you doing?” I find myself saying as I shake hands with Dr. Thomas Weber, a Daimler AG board member. Dawn is getting ready to break, and the temperature is a brisk, if not totally freezing, 9 degrees below zero Celsius on the piazza of the Daimler AG factory in Stuttgart-Moehringen, Germany. The cold’s not bothering me, however. What’s about to happen — the very first leg of the Mercedes-Benz F-Cell World Drive — is too exciting. Also, the fact that a typically loony German film crew keeps shoving a camera in my face, and a very lovely local Stuttgartian reporter keeps asking me questions, helps distract me from the weather. I’m surprised to see Dr. Weber here, as the night before was Daimler’s 125th Anniversary Party. I assume he’d be sleeping one off. Still, if I’m awake at 7:30 a.m., I suppose it makes sense that he is, too. Especially for the kickoff…

Technically, this is the second leg of the F-Cell World Drive. Last night at the big party, no less a crew than Michael Schumacher, Nico Rosberg, and David Coulthard drove the three F-Cells onto the stage. Standing there to officially launch the World Drive was Daimler head Dr. Dieter Zetsche and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Both of the bigwigs made speeches, and then the chancellor was supposed to hand the keys to three female Daimler engineers who worked on the F-Cell. Instead, she decides to have a George Herbert Walker Bush moment, commenting that the metal parts of the keys are missing — they won’t work. Dr. Z tries for a save but it’s too late. Chancellor Merkel hasn’t seen a car key in about a decade. Eventually the lady engineers drive the race car drivers off the stage. Point is, I ain’t buying the PR stunt. Today is the first leg of the World Drive, end of story.

“I think perhaps this is similar to what Bertha Benz experienced when she set off on the world’s first road trip,” says Weber. Not hardly, I think to myself, as I look around at the nine black support vehicles — a mix of GL 450s, Vianos, and Sprinters — that will be following the three Day-Glo F-Cells around the world for the next 125 days. “You are helping to usher in the next 125 years of motoring.” On this point, he might be right. For a slew of reasons, internal combustion-powered personal mobility is on the way out — as Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx just wrote about petroleum consumption in Fortune, “We cannot continue down this path” — and Mercedes-Benz is banking on the fact the hydrogen fuel-cell cars are a big part of whatever will replace gasoline. Weber leaves me and Autoblog’s Michael Harley, my companion for the next two days, and up shuffles a shivering Agathe Becht, one of the 25 or so Mercedes employees who will be following us and the F-Cells from Stuttgart to Reims, France, and eventually Paris.

“This is from the Chinese,” Agathe explains, as she hands us a woven red talisman to hang from our car’s rear view mirror. “It’s for the Chinese New Year, for good luck.” In addition to Mike and myself in Car 2, there are three Chinese journalists in Car 1 and a few of our new German engineer friends in Car 3. We’re informed that we’ll also have a German journalist in our back seat, Auto Motor und Sport‘s Markus Stier. Markus, we find out, is accompanying the F-Cells around the world for the next four months, and filing a daily blog. “You’re not married, are you?” I ask. He ain’t. We’re lined up and ready to begin the first leg, a 280-kilometer run to a Mercedes-Benz truck stop in France’s Champagne region. Weber waves a white F-Cell World Drive flag as someone tries to blow a vuvuzela, but it sounds like his lips are frozen. And with that, we’re off on the world’s first round the world hydrogen powered road trip.

Within 28.9 meters, Herr Stier proves to be an invaluable addition to our crew. Mercedes has outfitted each F-Cell with a navigation device called Tripy II, a beeping yellow box used by rally drivers that shows an incredibly crude pictogram of what the road ahead looks like and precisely counts down the distance to act in meters. Mike and I don’t really know what a meter is and instantly (almost) take a wrong turn out of the Stuttgart-Moehringen factory gates. “No, no, no!” Markus shouts, “Go right!” It turns out that Markus regularly covers and participates in rallies all over the world and in addition to near-perfect English, speaks Tripy II. Good for us, as I’m ready to toss the thing out the window.

In addition to Tripy II and the standard Command Navigation system, our B-Class has been equipped with a road book, paper maps, a cell phone, an Iridium satellite phone, a walkie-talkie to communicate with Dirk the photographer, and some bizarre Orwellian box that allows the powers that be to track the car’s every move. It also has a few buttons on it. “Press the green button when you want to communicate with us,” we’re told the day before by a stone-faced engineer named Arwed Niestroj, the senior manager of Fuel Cell Vehicle Fleet Operations. “Press the red button when you get in an accident.” Gotcha. Also, Arwed instructs us to please follow all traffic laws, including the specific instruction to stop at red lights. I mention this to illustrate how in typical Teutonic fashion, the F-Cell World Drive has been micro-planned down to the nanosecond. Nothing has been left to chance. “We have to worry about some of your colleagues,” Agathe informs us. “Italians?” I inquire. She shakes her head yes. Mike and I decide that the program is too uptight, and needs a bit of American-style cowboy shenanigans to loosen things up. Maybe we’ll graffiti the dashboard? Or put the car on a barge when we get to the Rhine. Imagine them tracking that! Our plan inadvertently comes to fruition much sooner than we imagined.

Part II: How to Really Upset a German Engineer
“This thing is great!” Mike proclaims from the driver’s seat. “The platform is isolated from the road and there’s no tire noise.” He pauses, “It’s just a great car.” I concur, reminding him that I got to drive a B-Class F-Cell last month in Valencia, Spain. While no sports car, the F-Cell has enough torque and power to happily bop along on the autobahn, a task Mike decides to put to the test. We get into the first unrestricted stretch — where you can drive as fast as you like — and he buries the throttle. 140 km/h, 150, 160, 170, 175 before we finally experience fuel cutoff at 178 kilometers per hour, about 110 mph. Remember, there’s no gasoline being burned. We’re running on pure hydrogen. I find this all the more amazing because the outside temperature is still hovering around 15 degrees below freezing. “Thank God we’re on snow tires,” Mike says. “The road is really frozen.”

Hot Shoe Harley keeps the throttle buried for essentially the next half hour. Whoever’s behind the wheel of the Chinese car is driving the same way, though Mike — a Porsche Owners Club driving instructor — eventually gets by them. I should point out that between Mike, Markus, and me, the B-Cell’s 136 horsepower, 214 pound-feet of torque traction motor is lugging around close to 700 pounds of man beef, plus another hundred or so in luggage. Not bad, little car. Only thing is, we’ve only covered one-third of the distance, but have burned through half of our hydrogen. The phone rings and it’s Melanie, one of the half-dozen Mercedes people following us. She wants to speak with Markus. I pass the phone back. Gulp. There’s a bunch of German coming from the backseat. “Okay,” Markus begins after he hangs up. “You are being advised to slow down to between 100 and 110 km/h. You must try and keep the consumption gauge under 20%.”

The B-Class F-Cell has three carbon-fiber fuel tanks under the back seat that are capable of storing 4 kilograms of compressed hydrogen at 700 bar. That’s 10,150 psi, to be exact. The consumption math is pretty simple. If you burn 1 kilogram of hydrogen per 100 kilometers, you have a 400-kilometer range. If, like we were doing, you burn 2 kilograms of hydrogen per 100 kilometers, you have a 200-kilometer range. That’s a pretty serious problem when there’s no hydrogen infrastructure whatsoever. On the very first road trip, the one that Karl Benz’s wife Bertha went on in his 1886 Patent Motorwagen, she was able to stop at a pharmacy and purchase the benzine/petroleum ether needed to fill up her 5-liter tank. No such luck here. The F-Cell World Tour does have a “mobile pharmacy,” as Daimler terms it, a portable refueling station (a big Sprinter that Mike and I affectionately nickname the Humpy Truck), but it takes about an hour to set up. The supposedly mobile pharmacy can’t just pull up on the side of the road and refuel the F-Cell.

We switch seats after a cappuccino and pain au chocolate at a French truck stop. There’s now a very good chance that we won’t make it to the refueling stop. As we ate, I could see the frustration in our German hosts’ faces. Please slow down, I’m reminded again and again and again. Instead of a tachometer, the F-Cell has a consumption gauge. When you step on the throttle, it informs you how much hydrogen you’re sending to the fuel cell stack. At low speeds, the lithium-ion battery (the same one found on the S400 Hybrid) can fully power the traction motor for short distances. Under braking the needle indicates “Charging” as the regenerative brakes replenish the battery. Full throttle (obviously) uses 100% of the available output from the stack, but once up to speed I can keep the needle at about 20% by setting the cruise at 110 km/h. This is slightly under the French speed limit of 130 km/h, but it’s no big deal. Mike and I swap stories with Markus and are having a grand old time.

Just before we go through a tollbooth, the center display suddenly tells us we’re running on “Reserve Fuel.” We’ve got a quarter tank left, just under 1 kilogram of hydrogen. We’ve got around 80 kilometers left to go. We pull over to discuss the situation with our minders. They want to call in a truck and have the car transported to the refueling station. I protest, saying I feel as if that would be giving up. The computer’s telling us our range is about 70 kilometers — we can drive even slower and increase our range. The Germans are very hesitant, as if something bad will happen if the car totally runs out of juice. The explanation is one of safety — we could lose power steering and brakes on the highway — but I think they just don’t want us to actually run out of fuel. Bad PR. My refusal to pack it in pays off, and after several hesitant, apprehensive phone calls we’re back on the road, going no faster than 90 km/h.

There’s actually a gauge that tells you how much hydrogen per 100 kilometers you’re consuming, but no one has shown it to us. Yet. However, we do find the readout that says how much hydrogen we have left in kilos. We’re down to 0.50 kilograms, about one pound of fuel. What’s killing us now is the rolling French countryside. Every hill forces my right foot closer to the proverbial metal, sending the consumption gauge spiking into the 40 or (gasp) 60% range. Things are getting tense. We’re down to around 0.35 kilos so we switch off the heater and the headlights. Mike tries to fold in the mirrors to make us more aerodynamic, but they don’t budge. We’re watching the readout like the sailors in “Das Boat” watched the depth gauge – in stunned silence. When we get down to 0.21 kilograms, the even-more-metrically-challenged-than-me Mike asks how much hydrogen we have left. “About four ounces,” I translate. To which he counters, “You mean we only have a Quarter Pounder of fuel?” I look at a puzzled Markus in the rearview. “That’s great, Mike. Way to reinforce the stereotype that Americans only think in terms of hamburgers.” Markus explodes in laughter. We all do. It helps to break up the tension, as the three of us start screaming about being a Big Mac away from disaster. Try not to use up the last Chicken McNugget of hydrogen! Finally, when we get to 0.19 kilos left, I pull over.

It’s not easy to explain to a pissed-off French cop why your funny little green car, along with two vans, one SUV, and one car hauler, are all pulled over on the side of the highway. Especially the part about why three of us keep running across traffic to snap pictures. Not surprisingly, no one knows the French word for hydrogen. “Non l’essence,” Agathe tries explaining over and over again. I’m sure the cop had no clue what she was talking about, but the task of arresting all 11 of us probably seemed too daunting. After some harsh French words of warning he takes off, and Car 2 is loaded into the back of a hauler. I’m sad and a little ashamed that our F-Cell has to finish the last 20 kilometers under diesel power.

“When we tested these cars on the Nuerburgring, we averaged 1.7 kilograms per 100 kilometers!” an extremely frustrated engineer yells at me. “You two averaged 1.5 kilograms per 100 kilometers!” The first part of the first day was not supposed to go like this. But neither we nor the Chinese team make it to the refueling stop under hydrogen power. All the meticulous planning, that perfectly designed formula, have been tossed out the window because the two loud, brash, and dumb Americans couldn’t keep it in their pants. The Chinese, too. The Germans are too polite to state that explicitly, but the fact that the same dude tells me how poorly we did three times in 10 minutes says enough. There’s also the fact that he couldn’t take his aggravation out on the Chinese team — they spoke neither English nor German.

I try explaining that this is all part of the experience, part of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable ones. After all, haven’t the Germans been inviting American journalists over to go flat-out on the autobahn for decades? Haven’t we eagerly accepted those invitations? Wasn’t Mike just doing what the Germans have trained us to do: go as fast as mechanically possible on one of the only unrestricted roadways in the world? Besides, no one told us not to keep our speed under 130 km/h. Says Arwed after I present our defense, “I wasn’t very clear on that part, I must admit.”

Part III: France Smells Good
Time to watch the refueling. The Humpy Truck is a trip. Essentially it’s nothing but a giant pump that pulls hydrogen in from several dozen external tanks and feeds it into the F-Cell. The trick is that the gas comes out of the canisters at 200 bar, gets taken up to 1,000 bar by Humpy and then is reduced back down to 700 for the car’s tanks. We call it Humpy because the pump is so big and violent that the dually Sprinter bounces up and down as if it’s humping something. Mercedes explains the normal refueling process should take around three minutes. But because of the cold weather the hydrogen is acting funny. So the F-Cell’s tanks must be filled and then topped off. Normal, in-ground hydrogen tanks will be climate-controlled. No such luck with Humpy.

After our dressing down, I’m back behind the wheel and our consumption has dropped to 1.15 kilograms per 100 kilometers. You had better believe we were shown how to get to this display before we left. It’s only another 200 kilometers or so to our stopping point just outside Reims, and the French speed limits will keep us to a top speed of 130 km/h. I decide that 120 km/h feels just fine. Once again the conversation turns to what a wonderful car the B-Class is. At 6’2,” Mike had been worried that he wouldn’t fit in Mercedes’ premium hatchback family hauler. On the way over to Stuttgart, he found himself sitting next to a Mercedes ML engineer who assured him that he took a holiday road trip with his wife and two kids for a few weeks in a B-Class. Plenty of room, the engineer assured the Autoblogger. Still, Mike was doubtful. As it turned out, we all had plenty of room. We decided it’s a shame that Mercedes-Benz doesn’t sell the B-Class in the States. True, a dozen or so B-Class F-Cells are being “leased” to some lucky Southern Californians. But like the F-Cell World Drive, that’s just marketing.

We spot an old, dilapidated church and pull over to take some pictures. There we discover one thing we don’t like about the B-Class: It has a lousy turning radius. This fact is greatly amplified by the narrow French country road running next to the church. No matter, really, as we climb across to the adjoining pasture to snap some pictures. “It smells incredible,” I say aloud. The air is thick with a mixture of fecund soil and smoke. “Yes,” responds Markus. “The French love burning things.” A bit later we discover the other thing about the B-Class F-Cell we don’t like when Mike shoots down an off-ramp a little too quickly: lousy brakes. We go back and forth trying to figure out if the little brakes are just overburdened by the extra pounds from the hydrogen equipment plus our near half-ton load, or if regenerative brakes are simply inferior by definition. Whichever the reason, we’re thinking Mercedes might need to come up with a different solution over the next 124 days.

About the F-Cell World Drive: Mercedes-Benz is out to prove that hydrogen power is a “mature” technology. To do so (apart from handing the keys over to totally immature American drivers), it is taking the cars on a 125-day, 20,000-mile journey across 14 countries and four continents. That’s a boatload of driving. Or, more specifically, a planeload, as all the cars (support vehicles included) will have to be loaded onto planes to go from Europe to North America to Australia and then Asia. Also, all the support vehicles run on gas or diesel. Isn’t that last part counter to the F-Cell’s mission? I’m assured that the total run of 200 B-Class F-Cells is so clean it will offset the carbon footprint of the support vehicles. Besides, the hydrogen is produced using natural gas, which has half the carbon footprint of gasoline. Mercedes also informs us that the entire 20,000-mile journey is the carbon equivalent to three and half minutes of German traffic. I guess you have to break a few eggs to get the world off fossil fuels.

We arrive in Reims without incident. Harley and I crash while Markus takes the F-Cell to the downtown gothic cathedral. Not only does it make a properly stunning backdrop, but Markus is somewhat of a history buff and this particular cathedral is where the French kings used to get themselves crowned. We set off in the morning for Paris and Mike and I are just blown away by the frozen French countryside. “I’d love to come back here in the spring with a Cayman,” I say, and he enthusiastically agrees. We pass through the abandoned grand-prix track at Reims-Gueux and the truth of the matter hits me. There’s just not enough time. Forgetting that the metal point-and-shoot camera feels like ice in my hand, how could we only have five or 10 minutes at such a location? How could we only have a day in France? Or two days with the F-Cell? I’m suddenly very jealous of Markus and the four months he’ll be spending on the World Drive, wife or no wife.

As for the future of road trips, it’s looking pretty bright. Despite our first day, first leg hiccup, the B-Class F-Cell proved its metal (so to speak) by comfortably schlepping three adults from Stuttgart to Paris, covering more than 400 miles without using a single drop of gasoline. Had a hydrogen infrastructure been in place, it would have been like any other road trip. True, as of right now this particular fuel-cell vehicle can only hold 4 kilograms of compressed hydrogen. But think about the first road trip that Bertha Benz took. The three-wheeler that she piled her and the kids into back in 1886 held only 5 liters of fuel. Imagine when these vehicles are a little more mature. Gasoline can then happily go the way of the dinosaurs from which it came.